Sunday, 6 March 2016

Time and Abstract

Going to your different supermarkets and shops, you’d definitely see them selling different cleaning agents. Be it used for washing of hands, body, or even cleaning the floor, all these cleaning agents ultimately have one objective -- to remove bacteria from a particular surface. Choosing the best antibacterial agent and finding out whether the information on killing bacteria found on the different cleaning agents websites and advertisement are true was what we wanted to find out. The choice of a good antibacterial cleaning agent would impact greatly on one’s health and environment. Such cleaning agents can affect the health level of the environment people work in, in terms of the cleanliness and hygiene. However, we were unable to test out all the brands in the market as there is many of them, and thus we chose the more reputable brands in the market such as Dettol, Lifebeoy etc.. Many brands in the market claim to have superior cleaning qualities that can remove up to 99.9% of bacteria, and on many occasions, these agents do not remove up to anywhere near 99.9% of bacteria. Thus, we wanted to apply these agents in real-life testing. The question we ultimately want to answer would be “Which antibacterial agent is the best in killing bacteria?” The reason this experiment was conducted was because we wanted to prove the real abilities of cleaning agents. Since many cleaning agents on the market claimed to have superior cleaning qualities that could clean and remove almost all bacteria on surfaces, we wanted to know if that was true. After some background research on the history and reputations of the cleaning agents, we chose the cleaning agents we wanted to test, which were Clorox, Dettol, Mama Lemon, and Life Buoy, as they all claimed to have superior cleaning qualities. Our hypothesis was that if Dettol was used, it could kill more bacteria than the other agents. For our experiment, we used E.coli and grew the bacteria using LB agar filled petri dishes, after serial dilution. To test the effectivity of each cleaning agent, we grew a batch of 2 dishes of bacteria, each dish containing 100μL of bacteria sample that was spread evenly, and 10μL of each cleaning agent, which was left in the incubator overnight at 37 degree Celsius. Using the same method, we made two more batches of bacteria dishes, and similarly incubated them. After that we counted the amount of colonies in the bacteria dishes, and compared them to the number of colonies in the control, and expressed them as a percentage for easier comparison.